Aorus X7 v6 Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

If we had to pick one trait that PC gamers have in common, it's competitiveness. That attribute is keenly reflected in the market for gaming notebooks, which continues to be the bright spot in the PC industry as 2016 rolls to a close. One look at the vast array of models from Alienware, MSI, HP, Lenovo, and smaller vendors such as AVADirect and Origin PC, and it's a clear indicator that literally everyone is getting in the game.

We've reviewed several notebooks from Taiwan-based Gigabyte over the past few years, most of which made it through our testing with high marks. Standing apart from the pack by being relatively sedate in terms of appearance ("black slab" is the Gigabyte laptop motif), the overall quality and performance of Gigabyte’s own-brand notebooks tends to be first-rate. But we suspect there's a reason Gigabyte doesn't visually dress up its machines: It leaves that job for the team at Aorus, Gigabyte's elite gaming brand.

The Aorus X7 we're reviewing in this article is now in its sixth generation, thus the "v6" after its name. This v6 model is more than just a technology refresh with Nvidia's new "Pascal" graphics cards, however (in our test unit, the GeForce GTX 1070). This time around, its major innovation is its RGB Fusion keyboard, with each key individually adjustable to one of 16.7 million colors. After using it, we think it's one of this notebook's best features.

Also in this generation is an improved cooling system, as well as a 1440p (2,560x1,440 pixels, also known as "QHD") display with support for Nvidia G-Sync. The latter is especially interesting, and something we've been waiting to see for a long time. It's well established at this point that the GTX 1070 can't really stretch its legs at 1080p, so the step up to a 1440p screen is just about a perfect match for its level of performance. (We'll have more on that in our benchmarking section.)

The high-performance theme continues with the Aorus X7 v6’s factory-overclocked Intel Core i7-6820HK processor, running at a blistering 4GHz; 16GB of RAM; and a 512GB SSD (supporting the PCI Express bus and the NVMe protocol), paired with a 1TB hard drive. Packing that into a metal-covered chassis that weighs just 7 pounds—and measures under an inch thick—is an impressive feat.

There’s little doubt that the Aorus X7 v6 sets the standards high, but it’s expected to do so at $2,699. That price point puts it right at the outer limit of what we’d spend for a GeForce GTX 1070-equipped notebook, as opposed to spending about 10 percent more for something with the more powerful GeForce GTX 1080. Value-wise, it’s in line with the competing Asus RoG G752VS OC Edition and MSI GT73VR Titan Pro. Let's take a look and see whether the Aorus X7 v6 stands out enough to top those strong early Pascal machines.

Design

The all-black Aorus X7 v6 has a formidable presence. Its angular exterior is set off by its snarling rear exhaust vents, which look something like the back of a stealth aircraft.

But what's truly striking about the X7 v6 is its thinness, ranging from nine-tenths of an inch to an inch at the most. It's downright gaunt for a 17.3-inch notebook, let alone one that's designed to house top-shelf gaming hardware. It’s about the same width as the typical 17.3-inch notebook, at 16.9 inches, though its 12-inch front-to-back footprint is a little more than average, we suspect because of the extra cooling. The X7 v6 is slightly heavier than the competing HP Omen 17, at 7 pounds, but it's still relatively light for a gaming notebook. (The MSI GT73VR Titan Pro, for one, is much heavier at 8.6 pounds.)

The X7’s slab-like chassis is high-quality all the way through. The exterior is covered almost entirely in black aluminum, with a flat anti-glare finish. The lid is stiff, and the base of the chassis even more so. We could barely get it to flex by twisting its corners with our hands (which should not be done at home, by the way).

The lid can be opened one-handed without the keyboard deck wobbling upward. Aorus's soft-white, illuminated logo is laser-cut in the center. Immediately below the display hinge is the center air intake, flanked by two additional ones new for this v6 model. The shield-shaped power button makes a solid, authoritative click when pressed, and it glows white when the notebook is powered up.

Something we immediately liked about the Aorus X7 v6's keyboard is its placement toward the front of the chassis. This means your hands don't have to go as far to reach it, but it still leaves plenty of room for the spacious touch pad in the palm rest.

The Aorus X7 v6 is the company’s first generation to feature its new RGB Fusion keyboards. This is the first true competition we’ve seen to Razer’s Chroma keyboards, employed on its latest Razer Blade notebooks. The keys on the X7 v6’s keyboard can be set to one of 16.7 million colors, the entire RGB spectrum. The keys can be individually controlled, or you can choose from many pre-configured patterns in the pre-installed Aorus Fusion software, which you can see here...

We became especially fond of "Fade on keypress", which does exactly that. The smiles we could evoke from inviting others to type something and watch each key change to a random color, then gently fade away, never got old. We also enjoyed the keyboard's "raindrop" pattern, where the keys twinkle on and off in different colors at random. The speeds and colors of the patterns are adjustable in the software, as well.

The keyboard backlighting is bright and sharp, plainly visible in the daytime. Also, the secondary symbols on the keys are backlit, unlike those on Razer’s RGB LED notebook keyboards that we tested. The lighting is faintly visible around each key, as well.

The keyboard has minimal flex. Although the travel is limited, the tactile feedback is adequate. Each press requires just the right amount of effort, with a rubbery but fast response. The keypresses are nice and quiet, as well. The one key-layout nuance worth noting has to do with the arrow keys, which are flush with the bottom edge of the main keyboard area and embedded in the surrounding keys. There's no finger-feel clue that sets apart the arrow keys, and their placement truncates the right Shift and the number pad "0." The rest of the keys are in their typical positions, and all are full-size, minus the top F-key row, and the nuances we mentioned.

Down the left edge of the keyboard is a column of five shortcut keys. You can store up to five discrete profiles across the Aorus X7 v6's macro-key array. With five separate keys, that allows for 25 programmable macros. Pressing the "G" key atop the column cycles through the profiles. (The column changes color to indicate which profile is activated.) The macro editor you use in concert with these keys is fairly basic, but it gets the job done. The settings for the keyboard lighting are also saved in the profile.

The amply sized touch pad is centered beneath the main portion of the keyboard, roughly in line with the spacebar. It has Aorus' light-sensitive logo smack dab in the middle. The anti-glare surface is excellent, as is the consistent clicking action. The clicks are just barely audible, and only the top one-quarter or so of the pad is more difficult to press than the rest. One unusual touch about the touch pad: When the notebook is off, pressing the lower right corner of the pad illuminates the status lights on the right side of the palm rest, with the five LEDs indicating how much battery charge remains.

Features

The 1440p display panel on our review unit is one of the Aorus X7 v6's standout features. Although others are coming, it's the first 17.3-inch notebook we've gotten into our labs to offer this display resolution. Up until now, if you wanted a higher resolution than 1080p on a notebook screen at this size, you were stuck with a big jump to 4K (3,840x2,160 pixels). Pairing a GeForce GTX 1070 with a 4K display isn't a balanced combo, since the 4K resolution is just too high for the card to handle without dropping the detail settings somewhat in today's AAA titles, in most cases. You'll need a GTX 1080 to single-handedly power 4K gaming without much compromise.

Adding to the excitement of this display is its 120Hz refresh rate, 5-millisecond (ms) response time, and Nvidia G-Sync support. Those three features combined translate into an extremely smooth gaming experience. The GTX 1070 won't average close to 120 frames per second (fps) in most of today's AAA titles at 1440p, at least with the detail settings cranked up, but it can do well over 60fps, in many cases. Most notebook display panels top out at 60Hz, so having a refresh rate higher than that is practical, in this case.

In addition to being good for gaming, the 1440p resolution is a boon for productivity. It has 78 percent more pixels than a 1080p display, meaning you can see that much more content when browsing the Web, working in spreadsheets, or photo editing without having to scroll or zoom in. It's also very helpful for using two windows side by side; you could squeeze in a third if you wanted, which is generally not practical to do on a 1080p display. We found we could see the text without using Windows 10's text scaling to bump up the font size.

The display doesn't support finger-touch input, but that's not a feature very common on gaming notebooks, anyway. Instead, it has a reflection-quashing anti-glare surface, a helpful attribute on a notebook that's likely to be used under a variety of lighting conditions.

The overall picture quality is good, though this being a TN panel, it falls a bit short when it comes to color reproduction relative to an IPS panel. The Aorus X7 v6 is also available with a 1080p IPS panel, if picture quality is of the utmost importance. For gamers, the 1440p panel's high refresh rate and low response time is probably worth the mild trade-off. Both panel choices support G-Sync, and have an anti-glare surface.

We have two misgivings, however, about the Aorus X7's 1440p display. The more minor of the two is that, as a TN panel, it has limited viewing angles. The horizontal viewing angles are nearly perfect, and there's only minimal distortion from above. From below, however, the colors invert and noticeably distort. We view this malady as a minor one because the display looks perfect when tilted back 45 degrees, as far as the display hinge will allow. In practice, only if you're really leaning back in your seat would you notice any distortion from below.

The other issue is specific to this 1440p display, at least the panel that came in our review unit and in a second unit we examined that was in the hands of one of our colleagues at sister site PCMag.com. Every other row of pixels looked slightly darker, resulting in the display having a striped or banded look when inspected closely. We needed to peer in close to notice it, and break out a magnifying glass to really see this in detail. Our eyes adjusted after a few hours' usage, and we had to concentrate to notice it afterward. We didn’t find that the subtle striping was noticeable while playing games or watching video, either. But when we're spending close to $3,000 for a notebook, we expect perfection, or very close to it. And this issue, however slight, doesn't allow the 1440p Aorus X7 v6 to live up to that definition. (We didn't have the opportunity to examine the 1080p version.)

When we contacted Aorus about the issue, company reps told us that the panel maker, AUO, said the banding is a by-product of the manufacturing process, and not a defect, but noted that AUO is working on the issue. Aorus furthermore said the display-banding issue won’t be an issue on the X7 v6 down the line in the future, but didn’t provide a date on when that would be. For customers that find it to be a problem, Aorus accepts returns. Remember, the X7 v6 is available with a 1080p IPS display, so if you’re sensitive to these kinds of things, you may want to check that version out. The 1080p panel won’t have the resolution of the 1440p panel, but it should have better picture quality, being an entirely different IPS panel.

The port selection on the Aorus X7 is sufficient for a desktop replacement. The left side of the chassis is sparsely populated with a cooling exhaust vent, a Killer E2200 Gigabit Ethernet jack, curiously blocked-out HDMI and VGA ports (they are non-functional), a USB 3.0 Type-A port, separate microphone and headphone jacks, and a speaker grille.

The right side starts with a parallel speaker opening, followed down the edge by a full-size SD-card reader, USB Type-A 3.0 and USB Type-C 3.1 ports, and HDMI 2.0 and mini-DisplayPort video outputs. The fact the HDMI port is version 2.0 is notable, as it allows for 4K video output at 60Hz.

Besides the exhaust vents, the rear of the chassis has the AC power jack, and the third and last USB port, a Type-A 3.0 connector.

The Aorus X7 v6’s two speakers produce pleasant sound. They hit their limit after about 70 percent volume, but clever driver optimization automatically levels the volume at that point to prevent distortion. The location of the speakers, firing out to the side from under either palm rest, allows for reasonable clarity. The speakers get loud enough to allow two people watch a movie.

Components

Our Aorus X7 v6 is well suited for up-to-the-moment PC gaming. Its Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card is a good match for its 1440p display. Based on our benchmark testing, a 1080p resolution just wouldn't give the card enough room to stretch its legs. For even more performance, Aorus also offers the X7 as a "X7 v6 DT" model with a GTX 1080. The GTX 1070 was factory-overclocked in our review unit, which gave it a definite edge in our gaming benchmarks, to follow.

The Intel Core i7-6820HK is the mobile quad-core processor to beat at the moment. It's already fast in its base iteration, with a 2.7GHz base clock, and 3.6GHz Turbo Boost mode. However, our X7 v6 arrived factory overclocked to a blistering 4GHz (off of an 8-40x multiplier). That puts it within striking distance—hard to believe!—of the desktop Intel Core i7-6700K. Needless to say, demanding applications are this processor’s snack food.

A good-enough 16GB of DDR4-2400 came pre-installed in our Aorus X7 v6, in a dual-channel configuration of two 8GB SO-DIMMs. The memory is expandable to 64GB, courtesy of the notebook's four available DIMM slots. 16GB is what we expect to see in a gaming notebook.

Upgrading the X7 v6 to get to those extra memory slots is a bit of an adventure, though. The base of the chassis is held on by no fewer than 12 star-shaped screws, all of which must come out. You'd also have to do that if you wanted to take advantage of the X7's storage expansion. Our review model had a Toshiba 512GB M.2 PCI Express solid-state drive (SSD), supporting the NVMe protocol for fast reads and writes. It also has a 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive. There's an additional PCI Express x4 slot for M.2 Type-2280 (80mm in length) SSDs, and one more M.2 slot, but that one "only" supports PCI Express x2 speeds. The latter is really designed to hold the Aorus X7 v6's available hardware "live streaming" chip—a hardware accelerator that offloads the work of game-streaming to services like Twitch.tv. But Aorus told us that option isn’t available in X7 v6 models shipping in the United States.

Thermals

Thermal management is always a challenge in a gaming notebook, given the space constraints and the cooling demands of a graphics chip. It gets even tougher when cramming very high-powered components in a chassis as thin as the Aorus X7 v6's.

The X7 v6 has two fans total, one positioned at each rear corner. They exhaust hot air out the rear and to the sides. The cooling has been upgraded in this v6 model versus previous iterations, with two large intake areas being added above the upper corners of the keyboard. The rest of the air intake comes from the large vent around the power button and grates on the bottom of the chassis.

In the course of everyday usage, the X7 v6 becomes lukewarm at most, with the fans always running but not particularly noticeable above ambient noises. Gaming changes the story a bit, with parts of the chassis heating up, and the fan noise escalating. There’s some fan whine at upper RPM levels. The fan noise isn’t at all overpowering, though, and while noticeable, it stayed within an acceptable volume level in our testing. We didn’t feel it would disrupt others sitting nearby, though we probably wouldn’t start gaming on the X7 in a recording studio or a library.

Another positive note to the X7’s fans is that they’re predictable. The fans don’t ramp up quickly in RPM while briefly doing something intense. Provided you’re running everyday tasks, you could use this notebook in a quiet environment without fear that the fans will kick in and spoil it.

We recorded external surface and internal component temperatures after a 30-minute gaming session, with the processor and graphics card at their factory-overclocked settings. The Core i7-6820HK topped out at 89 degrees C, while the GTX 1070 graphics card reached 78 degrees C. The CPU temperature is on the high side, but ultimately below its thermal threshold. We’ve seen the GTX 1070 push 90 degrees in some notebooks, such as Gigabyte’s own P35X v6, so the X7 v6’s comparably low temperature is welcomed.

On the chassis itself, most of the keyboard and surrounding area stayed in the mid-90-degree F range. That’s more than acceptable. The hottest part was right around the power button, which reached a still-moderate 107 degrees F. The underside of the notebook became hotter, topping out at 127 degrees F in the general area underneath the power button. That’s a bit too hot to sit in your lap, but you really couldn’t game with this notebook sitting on your lap, anyway; doing so would block the fan intakes.

Aorus includes two stick-on "feet" with the X7 v6, to be attached on the underside of the chassis, just inside of the two rear rubber feet already on the bottom of the notebook. A small strip of 3M adhesive secures them. They prop up the rear of the notebook off the desk surface by about a centimeter, and beneficially allow increased airflow under the chassis. The feet can be folded to allow the notebook to sit as it normally would without them.

To test their effectiveness, we installed the feet after our 30-minute gaming session, and re-measured the temperatures after playing an additional 30 minutes. (All the while, of course, we insisted to management we were "working.") To our surprise, there was almost no change in temperature on the outside, or for the processor and graphics card. Something we did notice, however, was that the X7’s cooling fans seemed to run less often at their higher RPMs with the feet installed, telling us the increased airflow under the notebook helped the cooling system to get the airflow it needed.

We don't generally expect to be impressed with the cooling systems on ultra-thin gaming notebooks. It’s rare that the combination works out, but it does in the case of the Aorus X7 v6. Its fans can be a little noisy, but they certainly keep the temperatures under control inside and out. Keep in mind that we did all our testing with the processor and graphics card in their factory-overclocked states.